Depends on what photos you want. If you want the ceremony to have the sunset as a backdrop, then you should time it with your wedding. However, if you want posed portraits with the sunset as the backdrop, then you should push up the wedding (and photograph during cocktail hour) or push it back (and do a first look). We pushed our wedding up and did sunset photos during cocktail hour.

i’d recommend you do it at 3:30. there’s no real way to capture a person and the sunset without 1) flash or 2) making the people silhouettes. while i love a good sunset silhouette and will even play with flash for portraits, it’s not really the best for the ceremony.

an hour and a half before sunset will give you pretty, soft, golden light…and it will give you time to get some beautiful portraits afterward. if you need to do family portraits…and you have a big family, i’d do it even earlier…getting everyone to the same location and lining them up can take a while…something like herding cats.

@sunshinewish15: I’d probably go with a 4:30 ceremony so you can get some great sunset photos at the very end.

We had to plan our ceremony around the sunset (which will happen pretty early in November unfortunately) because we’re having an outdoor ceremony as long as it’s not too cold, rainy, etc. We had to bump our ceremony up to 4:00 because we’re having a 30-45 minute ceremony (the details haven’t all been ironed out yet) and the sun is supposed to set around 4:50. That should allow for a few really awesome pictures as the sun is setting (we hope, anyway).

@angelinthesnowxo: that’s cutting it super close! i’ve shot a lot of weddings where things don’t start on time…and getting away from everyone after the ceremony in time to get those beautiful sunset portraits may take longer than the ideal time frame.

We went out to our site on our wedding date the year before our wedding so we could watch the sunset and determine the best time for our ceremony so we could have pictures taken after the ceremony. Official sunset is at 6:30pm but it doesn’t get dark until almost 7pm. So we’re having our ceremony start at 5:00pm and then doing pictures from 5:30pm until 6:30pm with some wiggle room until 7pm.